Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Historian Says the Answer Is Complicated

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As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, one question that has sparked debate for generations continues to surface: Was America founded as a Christian nation or a secular nation?

A prominent historian at an evangelical seminary says the answer is more complicated than either side often suggests.

Thomas S. Kidd is a research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of numerous books on American history, including ones on Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and George Whitefield. He also wrote the widely used textbooks American History (Vols. 1 and 2 – B&H Academic) and Christian History: From the Reformation to the Present (B&H Academic).

As to whether America was founded as a Christian nation or a secular nation, Kidd says the answer “depends on how you frame the question.”

“I mean, if the idea is ‘was Christianity influential on the American founding’ [then] the answer is clearly yes. I mean, a lot of the ideas – most obviously, equality by common creation by God, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence – don’t make sense without a belief in a creator and a created order,” Kidd told Crosswalk Headlines.

“But there are also important ways in which we're not founded as a Christian nation – probably the most obvious one is that, unlike England, we decided not to have an official state church. And so when the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, that's basically saying: ‘Okay, England has the Church of England, which has tax support and official legal status, but we're not going to do that.’ Instead, we're going to emphasize freedom of religion for all religious groups.

“And so there's a legal sense in which we definitely were not founded as a Christian nation, but I think as it played out that actually made Christianity stronger in America than it is today in England, which still has an official state church.”

Kidd, who is Baptist, said it’s easy for today’s Christians to forget that members of several Christian denominations faced persecution in colonial America. Baptists, Quakers, and Catholics all endured varying degrees of discrimination, legal restrictions, and, at times, imprisonment because of their religious beliefs.

“State-run religion is usually corrupt and ineffectual. For me, as an evangelical and a Baptist, I don't want the government to run a denomination,” Kidd told Crosswalk Headlines. “I don't want official state religion – because generally throughout history, state religion has meant corrupt religion, corrupt doctrine, corrupt church officials. They often persecute dissenters – like the Baptists were at the time of the American Revolution.

“And so I would much rather put the emphasis on religious liberty, and if it means that we had a kind of a secular state at the time of the founding, so be it if that means that we're really putting the emphasis on religious liberty.”

It was the evangelicals at the nation’s founding who were calling for a strict separation between church and state, Kidd said.

“Baptists, in particular, were often viciously persecuted by the state churches, so they had no interest in the government sponsoring a denomination. They wanted the government to leave them alone, so that they could have full religious liberty and preach the gospel in freedom.”

The often-debated term “separation of church and state” simply means that the Founders “chose not to run or sponsor an official denomination,” Kidd said.

“This was not at all a theoretical question. I mean, are we going to keep doing what we've always been doing, which is the Church of England in England, and almost all the colonies had an official denomination,” he said. “We decided in the Constitution, in particular, to stop doing that, [but] that does not mean anti-religion, it doesn't mean anti-Christianity, and it doesn't mean that Christianity has no public role in America.”

Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Vernon Lewis Gallery/Stocktrek Images

Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel. 

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